Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday June 18, 2010 @03:38PM
from the fifty-bonus-points-for-each-liquor-store-you-loot dept.

eldavojohn writes "The United States government has decided that children need a video game to learn about what to do before, during, and after an emergency or hazardous event. Collect an emergency kit! Create an emergency plan! Be informed of what to do! Suffer from heat exhaustion inside the Superdome! ... Wait, what? Oh, I guess FEMA omitted that last one. Disaster Hero is coming in 2011 — plenty of time before 2012."

There are tons of web-based games out there, aimed at little kids. The best ones manage to integrate some form of competitive nature. I remember way back in the day, when I was a young'n, there was this little site called neopets. [neopets.com]

Some of you might be familiar with this child-attracting monstrosity. It is full of minigames which give them points which they can spend on a variety of stuff. Stuff for your Neopet, as your Neopet is kind of like your avatar, or about as close as you're going to get. I find that they did well in attracting to the "Cool & Cute", the two fields that attract younger kids, however in retaining their audience that had to make it fun enough to keep playing. The best way to do this is to make it competitive with other players.

You could open a shop, and little kids would start playing the market like the stock market (despite neopets actually having its own built in stock market) - kids would understand the investment skills of buy low sell high. There was also a combat arena where you could face off your neopet against other people's neopets. A leveling system I can't remember, weapons, gear, all that stuff.

I'm sure its still like that somehow today, but thats about all I remember.

So, if there is any tip I can give to anyone making a web-game for kids: it's appeal to that social interaction and competitiveness that keeps kids playing webgames, keeps jocks playing football, and keeps nerds playing WoW.